People with speech production or comprehension impairments often rely on alternative and augmentative communication (“AAC”) technologies in order to regain these functions. Many AAC techniques suffer from slow throughput (i.e., rate of production of communication). For example, for people without substantial cognitive or vision impairments, such as people locked-in syndromes such as ALS, eye gaze based typing has become a common AAC technology. However, eye gaze typing has a throughput that can be an order of magnitude slower than unimpaired spoken conversation. This impedes a wide swath of people from meaningfully engaging society.
Additionally, those that find machine-human interfaces difficult to learn or that are unpracticed with a particular machine-human interface may experience communication throughput impairment. Moreover, language barriers also impede communication throughput between people that speak different languages.